Hercules and the Erymanthian Boar

Look into the right-hand corner and you find the same man twice. In the foreground Hercules is about to take the boar that had been wrecking the farms of Arcadia. In the corner, small and far off, he is already walking away with the dead weight of it across his shoulders, carrying it back to the king who had ordered the job. Two moments in one canvas was an old habit of storytelling in paint, and Zurbarán uses it here without fuss, the way a page of a book runs on. He painted it in 1634 among ten canvases on the hero's deeds, lighting the near figure hard so that the muscles read from across a room.